Today's networked computing environments are used in businesses for generating and storing all types of critical data. The systems used for moving, storing, and manipulating this critical data are expected to have high performance, high capacity, and high reliability, all in an ever smaller package. Many of these systems are further required to be as low cost as possible.
Many things add to the cost of the system. One of these is manufacturing testing. As systems have become more complicated, manufacturing test protocols and systems have followed in step. For example, components on boards often have pins dedicated to JTAG, a boundary scan protocol for testing the continuity of device pins and board signals. CPU emulation is also frequently used in manufacturing test. Other manufacturing tests include voltage margining. In all cases, the test circuitry and test connectors needed to support the test equipment must be mounted on the modules to be tested, and thus become integrated into the product as shipped. Though manufacturing test is necessary, the added cost of the test circuitry and test connectors adds unnecessary cost to the modules and thus to the product. What is needed is a way to separate manufacturing test circuitry and connectors from the modules under test so that the test circuitry and connectors need not ship with the finished product.